The largest outflow of Chinese bronze ware occurred before the outbreak of the Anti Japanese War
When it comes to Chinese cultural relics spread abroad, we generally think that they were stolen by the Eight-Nation Alliance. They certainly looted a lot of cultural relics, but the main reason for the loss of Chinese cultural relics is not through this channel. The loss of Chinese bronze ware is a particularly complex issue. In the West, a Chinese artifact can have multiple collectors, making it particularly difficult to trace its origin. Especially in the early days, we often couldn't know where a bronze ware was unearthed and by which route it was sold. Only when it entered museums in the West did we have archival materials to trace back.
The largest outflow of bronze ware occurred before the outbreak of the Anti Japanese War in 1937, during the period of particularly turbulent social and political situation in the late Qing Dynasty and early Republic of China. Some of the routes of outflow were illegal smuggling, while others were seemingly legal transactions. For example, a businessman named C. T. Loo in Shanghai opened a shop specializing in Chinese art abroad, and a company set up by Japanese Sadajirō Yamanaka Yamanaka. At that time, these two companies exported a large number of Chinese art in a seemingly legal form, accounting for Absolute advantage in quantity. C. T. Loo even built a very tall Chinese building in France called Tong Lou, which shows the great influence of the industry he formed overseas.
The person who first came into contact with Chinese cultural relics in Europe and America was a person named Senucci. He himself had a great interest in antiques and collected a large number of European artworks. When he traveled to the East, he also bought many ancient artworks, but he did not recognize them at the time. After returning to China, he invited scholars studying the East to identify and discovered that many of them were Chinese bronzes. From then on, he became interested in Chinese art and built a personal museum, which has now become a museum in Paris.
The most famous collector of Chinese bronze artifacts overseas is the aristocrat Friel, who specializes in producing train hair. Most of the Chinese bronzes in his collection were purchased from C. T. Loo and are famous for their delicacy. C. T. Loo often sold his boutiques to him because he was willing to pay 10 times higher prices. In the 1920s, Flier donated his collection of Chinese bronze artifacts to the US government.
Another climax of the spread of Chinese bronze ware was after the reform and opening up, which was stimulated by economic development and led to the theft of tombs in many places. The transmission path was both domestically and overseas. There is a wealthy man named McKinley in Chicago. In the building where he stores his collectibles, both walls are made of bronze, and of course, there are also Southeast Asian ones besides China. There is also a famous Belgian antique dealer who often has some small bronzes in her auction, which is suspected to be lost from Wenxi County. I also know a collector named Leon Blake who is quite hidden. I have never seen his collection myself, but he once wanted someone to make a catalog of his bronze collection. When he heard about China's pursuit of lost overseas cultural relics, he dared not publish the catalog, fearing that he would be pursued by the Chinese government after appearing in public.
It can be said that before World War II, the Western collection of Chinese art had already formed a rough pattern. Overall, the United States has become an increasingly large collection site for Chinese bronze artifacts, as they have seen the emergence of super wealthy individuals like Flier, and even more so after World War II. Bronze ware also flows with the flow of wealth.
There is also a very famous collector in the United States, Sikler, who is a dentist and gained a lot of wealth by selling patents for drugs. He became the largest collector of Chinese bronze after World War II, and later donated his collection of bronze to the US government in the form of the Seikler Museum. Sackler himself also attached great importance to the study of bronze ware and published a set of books on his collection of Chinese bronze ware, which is still the highest level and most influential among Western books on Chinese bronze ware to this day.
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